‘Who killed Sohrabuddin Sheikh inquiry?’ Arun Jaitley responds to Rahul Gandhi’s remark on verdict
The Union minister said he had written to former PM Manmohan Singh on the politicisation of the investigation in 2013, which has turned true over the years.
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday hit back at Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s tweet following the verdict which acquitted all 22 people accused in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.
“NO ONE KILLED... Haren Pandya. Tulsiram Prajapati. Justice Loya. Prakash Thombre. Shrikant Khandalkar. Kauser Bi. Sohrabuddin Shiekh. THEY JUST DIED,” Gandhi had tweeted a day after a special court delivered its verdict on the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case.
Responding to Gandhi’s tweet, Jaitley said it would have been appropriate if Gandhi had asked “the right question, namely who killed Sohrabuddin case investigation?”
Jaitley, in a Facebook post, also criticised the Central Bureau of Investigation. “More relevant than the order of the acquittal is the observation of the judge that in the investigation, from the very beginning, investigating agency did not investigate the case professionally in order to find out the truth but to divert it towards certain political persons,” he said.
Special CBI Judge SJ Sharma, who delivered the verdict, blamed the investigating agency of conducting inquiries with the “preconceived and premeditated” goal to implicate political leaders. Sheikh, a wanted criminal, was killed in an alleged encounter in November 2005. His wife was allegedly raped and killed three days later, and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati was was shot dead by the police in December 2006.
The Congress President Sh. Rahul Gandhi raised the issue “that nobody killed Sohrabudin”. It would have been more appropriate if he had asked the right question "who killed Sohrabudin case investigation?", he would have got the right answer.
— Arun Jaitley (@arunjaitley) December 31, 2018
Jaitley also uploaded a copy of a letter he had written as Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “detailing the politicisation of the investigation” in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh, Tulsi Prajapati, Ishrat Jahan, Rajinder Rathore and the Haren Pandya cases.
“Every word of what I have said in the letter, over the next five years, have proven to be true,” Jaitley said. “This is an irrefutable evidence of what the Congress did to our investigative agencies. Those who have recently shown a belated concern for institutional independence should seriously introspect as to what they did to the CBI when they were in power,” he said, referring to Congress’s accusation about the Centre interfering in the agency’s work.